The non-individualistic and social dimensions of love drugs

This paper argues that in Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships Brian D. Earp and Julian Savulescu (2020) underplay the importance of the interpersonal and social dimensions of love, because they measure enhancement in terms of individual happiness. Love is not just about our individual happiness because 1) other people are involved and 2) moral responsibilities to them might weigh as much as happiness. To make room for the interpersonal and social dimensions we should not look at love as a feeling nor as an individual concern. We best look at love as a practice that focuses outside the self. Like Iris Murdoch (SOG) has argued, love should be seen as an opening up to anything beyond our ego. When this practice of self-transcendence is in itself characterized as a movement towards moral progress, as it is in Murdoch’s framework, it offers us alternative criteria to measure love drug induced enhancement. This paper places Murdoch’s useful concept of love within a social context with contingent yet influential power relations which force us to reflect more deeply on the interpersonal and social dynamics of love before establishing the role that love drugs could play as a facilitator in the movement towards moral progress.